Dead Hogs and the Dirty Ground

Down in the newly insane state of North Carolina, they're dealing with an ongoing threat of severe flooding due to the rains of departed Hurricane Matthew. This has brought with it a panoply of subsidiary disasters, some of them more wretched than others, but most of them having to do with other problems that existed anyway but that become catastrophes when you add water. The state legislature responded by sending some of the state's disaster money to Governor Pat McCrory so he could use the dough to defend the state's bathroom-identity law. This was a political leghold trap that even McCrory was smart enough to avoid, although the rise in his political IQ likely is inversely proportional to his plummeting poll numbers.

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The flooding is bringing the state to the brink of an environmental catastrophe on two fronts. The first has to do with the huge storage ponds for coal ash, the byproduct of the state's coal mining operations. Coal ash is loaded with a devil's brew of arsenic and other heavy metals. (The worst coal ash spill, in Kingston, Tennessee, in 2008, loosed 1.1 billion gallons into the waterways and hollers.) The fear, as ThinkProgress tells us, is that the floodwaters will both overwhelm and undermine the dams holding back the ash.

"When we reach this point, when the flooding is already occurring, there isn't much we can do other than try to encourage people to leave the floodplains and assist people where they need assistance, but we can't do anything to stop the flooding now," Travis Graves, Lower Neuse Riverkeeper with the Carolina Waterkeeper Alliance, told ThinkProgress. "This is all the result of decades of bad policy."

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Which brings us to…the lagoons of pig shit, and WECT is our go-to source for this, ah, issue. The state's hog and chicken farming operations always have been environmental time bombs. In 1999, when Hurricane Floyd hit the state, hogs and chickens drowned in their pens and their bodies became disease vectors. This could be worse.

Cape Fear Riverkeeper Kemp Burdette is sounding the alarm for what this could mean for people in Southeastern North Carolina who live near or downriver from livestock farms. The flood waters could breach some, if not many, of the hundreds of hog lagoons and poultry waste piles scattered across our region. Floodwaters could also drown livestock housed on those farms. "This is just a big massive pit of hog feces and urine," Burdette explained of your typical hog lagoon. "The animals that are confined to those [neighboring] barns can literally drown inside the barns which we saw in Hurricane Floyd…. Eventually the barns can be damaged enough that the animals literally float out. And there were plenty of stories during hurricane Floyd of full grown dead hogs floating down rivers."… Rick Dove, with the North Carolina Riverkeepers and Waterkeeper Alliance, conducted aerial surveillance Monday and reported that floodwaters at some local hog farms are very close to breaching the hog waste lagoons and the water is still rising. If the lagoons are breached, Burdette said water contamination could put people who live nearby and depend on well water at risk. New Hanover and Brunswick County residents who depend on the Northeast Cape Fear River for their water supply should have more protection if their water is treated by a utility authority's water treatment plant. But any contact with the surface water could still be dangerous for folks battling the floodwaters. "If they have open cuts, which you frequently get when you're out handling debris during a flood, it can enter your body. If it splashes your face it can enter your body. It's a real threat and people need to be aware of that," Burdette said of exposure to contaminants like E.coli and listeria.

But hog farmer Tom Butler says state scrutiny has declined under the current governor, Republican Pat McCrory. He says his most recent inspection amounted to little more than a courtesy call. "We're surely not inspected like we used to be," he says. "I should be happy about that, but I'm not." Regulations, he says, keep him on his toes: "We're always busy on a farm. We always have more than we can do. And the first thing we're not going to do is waste management. But if we know that inspector's coming in six months, or unannounced, what are we going to do? We're going to do good waste management."

This noxious slop gets into the environment anyway, but something like the hurricane jumps the process into overdrive. There are a great number of these all around the country—pig lagoons, ash ponds, old landfills, waste dumps and other little Hiroshimas waiting to detonate. When people talk about our collapsing infrastructure, it's not just roads and bridges. It's also dams and levees and other things that are built to keep at bay the natural forces of the environment and the unnatural forces of industrial and agricultural enterprise.

(A year ago, a survey determined that 1,200 dams around North Carolina were rated as "high hazard," the second-highest total among the states.)

And if we neglect to maintain and improve our defenses against the latter, or if we refuse to reform our approach to them because that would be too expensive and our politicians are too timid, then we all are at the mercy of the former, and those natural forces of the environment are getting stronger and more destructive in large part because we refuse to accept the consequences of industrial and agricultural enterprise.

So, somehow, you make do with living next to lakes of coal ash or lagoons of pig shit, and it becomes part of your daily life. Then a powerful hurricane blows in off the Atlantic and the waters begin to rise and overwhelm your neglected infrastructure and, pretty soon, there are dead hogs floating down the middle of Main Street and there are drowned chickens cluttering the school yard and you're up to your knees in animal waste and arsenic. And the water rises some more.